GSK shows what fashion can say about art

The last of the Royal Academy’s three annual GSK Contemporary exhibitions focuses on the connections between art and fashion.

Thankfully, rather than offering a celebration of glamour and excess in these straitened times, Aware: Art Fashion Identity attempts to demonstrate that clothing, through its daily relevance to all of us, offers a direct means of addressing big issues, from cultural and personal identity to globalisation and the environment.

Contemporary artists and fashion designers are pitched in together, and the result, as with the previous GSK shows, is a mixed bag. There is a vast breadth of work, from grand costume, like Grayson Perry’s ceremonial Artist’s Robe (2004), set in a niche above Burlington Gardens’ staircase, with its repeated embroidered eyes evoking the myth of the artist as a seer or shaman, to a pared-down film of Yoko Ono’s seminal Cut Piece (1965), in which she sits expressionless on stage as audience members cut away at her clothing, ultimately leaving her half-naked.

Designers supply some of the show’s more surprising elements. Dai Rees’s Carapace: Triptych, the Butcher’s Window (2003) features three leather garments hanging from meat hooks. Based on Fifties dress patterns which are reassembled to look like carcasses, they invoke sides of beef painted by Rembrandt and Soutine, but also contain exquisite marquetry within and a visceral threat evocative of surrealist objects.

Meanwhile, designer-cum-artist Helen Storey’s Say Goodbye (2010) addresses the environmental impact of fashion with biodegradable textiles — a dress, made of an enzyme-based material, will gradually dissolve in a pool of water during the exhibition.

However, too many other exhibits are essentially garments on stands, records of other forms of activity, and lack the power they might have when animated by a body. So while Aware is thoughtful and tightly curated, it lacks the spark that makes truly great group exhibitions crackle and burst into life.